The winners in business have shifted markedly in the past decade—and the keys to success are likely to be very different again in ten years’ time. How should leaders prepare their companies to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape? What will it take to win the '20s?

The Value Unleashed by DevOps

Agile transformation delivers significant benefits on its own. Through DevOps—the integration of IT operations with cross-functional agile teams—the upsides of agile can go even further.

Achieving agile transformation across an entire enterprise is a feat in any industry. Many companies still hesitate to make the leap into an agile way of operating, and are being outpaced when it comes to time to market, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement by agile competitors.

For organizations that have embraced agile, the upsides are clear. But many are asking how to take their transformations further. By adopting DevOps practices, agile organizations can further enhance the efficiency, agility, and quality of their development sprints.

On Its Own, an Agile Approach Delivers Significant Benefits

2x–4x faster time to market after a transformation lasting 1.5-3 years

3x–4x higher customer satisfaction and return on digital investment

Over 90% employees report being engaged, as superior talent is attracted and retained and employee satisfaction rises

By integrating employees from IT operations into cross-functional agile teams and emphasizing automation, DevOps can further boost these benefits, creating tremendous value in three important ways.

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Three Ways DevOps Adds Value to Agile Transformation

Efficiency

With its emphasis on automation and smaller, more frequent releases, DevOps can spark significant efficiency gains. Developers spend more time developing and less time waiting for machines to be configured or integrating code. At the same time, automation means fewer manual processes within IT operations—which in turn results in lower costs and lower error rates.

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Agility

DevOps eliminates much of the manual orchestration required to implement new features and changes.

By automating as much as possible—in testing, integration, and in some instances even deployment—DevOps enables companies to work with much smaller sections of code, even just a few lines at a time. This results in quicker feedback and integration as well as streamlined handling of errors—and delivers essential features and changes faster. Under the DevOps approach, deployments can occur 100 to 200 times more frequently.

And by tearing down the walls between ops and development, the cooperation fosters shared responsibility. This eliminates the expectation that “ops will fix” any software problems created when new features or functionality are added. Instead a culture of quality emerges as the cross-functional teams share responsibility for the successful implementation of their jointly developed solutions. It also accelerates the time to market, since coordination across the functions is clarified and streamlined.

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Quality

In the agile model, developers hand over completed development projects to the IT operations function, which then monitors and maintains those projects.. By engaging both sides throughout the entire development process, DevOps enables faster and easier fixes, and motivates developers to prevent future problems, therefore, embracing a manra of “you build it, you fix it."

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Meanwhile, as DevOps brings more automation and standardization to the development process, human errors can be reduced and best practices more easily shared across teams. This also improves quality. The results are one-half to one-third fewer failures, about 20% less time spent on unplanned work, and one-half to one-third less time spent on remediating security issues.

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